


achilles' last stand

by MathildaHilda



Series: until the end of infinity [9]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, POV Second Person, all of tony stark's adopted kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 12:33:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18894715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: One thousand is simply not enough.Three thousand is where the very best are at.





	achilles' last stand

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Achilles' last stand" by Led Zeppelin
> 
> CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: ENDGAME! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK
> 
> why is everything i write so damn sad

 

It’s a jumbled mess of words, pulled from a mouth that has little contact with a brain; deprived as it is of oxygen and something even resembling food.

It’s a jumbled mess, but it’s a mess Pepper recognizes. It’s a mess that is all yours.

 

(” _Mister Stark?”_

Titan is quiet now.

Nothing has walked there for years.)

 

You smile, short and clipped, at the pale light from the helmet.

Imagine it is the green of Pepper’s eyes; imagine it’s the light from your repulsors when you first made them take flight.

 

(Imagine it’s the stars, before they haunted your dreams like silent ghosts.)

 

It’s been twenty-two days.

Twenty-two days, in which you have almost managed to wipe the last of Peter from underneath your fingernails and from the scar Thanos left you with. It’s been twenty-two days, where you’ve taught the blue meanie a simple game, fixed a ship that soon enough broke down ( _everything breaks around you)_.

Twenty-two days. And this is what kills you.

Nebula pulls you from the ground, places you in the captain’s chair and lets you face the stars, because sometimes they can be very, so very beautiful. You deserve something beautiful, if this is the last place you’ll ever see.

Your brain isn’t connected to your mouth, and it’s somehow disconnected to your eyes as well, because that woman is on fire and there must be something weird going on in the last of your oxygen reserves _because how the hell is she on fire?_

But she smiles, all soft and lifelike, and cocks her head to the side once.

 

(The stars wants you dead.

She is not a star.

But she’s close enough.)

 

 

 

 

You land on Earth and in Pepper’s arms, and Nebula stumbles before gravity settles around her. You land on Earth, and you think you’ve shed every last tear, but apparently not because here comes the waterworks again.

They don’t fall, but you look at Steve, utter those four, simple and very small words, and you can just imagine the way they looked on Peter’s young, dying face.

 

_(“I lost the kid.”)_

 

Four words is all it takes. And, considering you almost died in space, _the one place where you didn’t want to be_ , it’s a miracle you say anything at all.

You had said your last words to your own dying creation that had bathed you in flickering lights, and you had wished it’d been enough.

But the universe has funny ways of telling you no.  
  
 

(Peter Parker had said his last words into the crook of your neck and breathed them out to the stale air of a dead planet.

It would’ve only been fair, if you had gone then too.

You’ve said your last words. But death never quite had a grip on you, did it?)

 

Steve is solemn and sad, grieving a little bit the same as he had when he’d woken up and was all sharp edges of broken hero. You’d seen it; the grieving of time lost and comrades gone. You’ve felt it too; your mother, your father, Obie, the team.

 

_(Everyone leaves eventually.)_

 

Right now, right this miniscule moment in a shattered universe where hardly any words needs to be said, there are no heroes.

 

 

 

You just want to sleep.

Sleep and dream of nothing.

No dreams of ash and blood and crying kids and that guttural cry that ripped from Quill’s throat when you all learned what had been done to his girl.

 

 _(‘Gamora. Her name was Gamora.’_ Nebula had told you out in the vastness of space, where private secrets went out the window.)

 

You don’t want to dream. But you’re not quite sure whether you want to sleep or simply drift off.

If you were to do both; both sleep and dream and stay here, please dream of pretty things.

 

(Dream of the kid’s excitement when you allowed him the most absolute of control in the upgrades of his suit save everything from, somehow, installing a self-sufficient ice cream machine.

Dream of that party at the Tower before everything turned sour.

Dream about Rhodey finding you in the desert, where everything, for a moment, seemed alright again.

But above all, dream of Pepper’s smile.)

 

 

 

 

You have every right to be angry; you all do, but none more than you.

You’re not just angry at the universe and Thanos and what a simple snap of his sausage fingers could do to every species in the universe.

You’re not just angry that you have nothing more than a bunch of heartbreaking words to relay to a raccoon whose fingers are itching for a bottle, or the woman in Queens who has been, desperately searching, but maybe, just _maybe,_ has now given up the possibility of ever getting her nephew back.

If you were to die right now from exhaustion and starvation, your words to Steve seems good enough to be the last thing you’ll ever say.

 

 

 

 

Pepper’s smile is almost always sad these days.

She was sad when you stepped off the ship; sad because you’d been gone and sad because you’d all lost so much in under a minute.

She was sad when you woke up, the rest of the team gone up to space to fight the very same evil you had almost died to stop.

She’s still a little sad when they come back, and Thor’s eyes still hasn’t shied away from the guilt of not stopping Thanos earlier.

She’s a little sad, but then again, so are you, when you find yourself back in the penthouse in New York.

It’s almost a year when the smiles have faded from sad to alright. It’s almost a year, and then she presents you with an Iron Man lunchbox and forces you to open it as soon as you’ve switched FRIDAY off for the day because at some point you need to stop listening to all the names of those no longer here.

You’re both crying, but they are happy tears and it feels like you haven’t smiled in years.

 

 

 

 

The cottage made it easier, somehow.

Made it easier to stop the superheroing, stop the constant chatter from Steve about everything they could do to bring everyone back.

(You want them back, dear god, but sometimes enough is enough.)

The woods are quiet, and still filled with some semblance of what was lost. You hear an owl almost every night, making its food run around your little house, and you hear the now unmistakable barking of a fox and the slow and careful steps of deer.

It’s peaceful. It’s home.

You’re a long way away from the man who got stuck in a cave all those years ago.

 

 

 

 

She’s perfect.

Pepper’s perfect too, of course, but when you look at your little girl you can’t help but feel that little bit of pride you’ve always felt with your machines. It’s almost the same as when you finished DUM-E and U.

Almost the same as when you finished J.A.R.V.I.S.

Almost is a strong word, because Morgan H. Stark exceeds every and all expectations such a word might imply.

 

 

 

 

When you’d met May Parker, once you were strong enough to walk two feet without an IV in your arm, you’d expected a punch.

You’d expected the tears when you told her, you’d expected the words that came tumbling and mixed together into incomprehensibility in her mouth.

You had expected the woman behind the door, but you hadn’t expected the hand that gripped yours across the stained kitchen table, something that was proof of the boy having ever existed with those wide stains of paint of hours of finger-painting.

You hadn’t expected the _‘I’m sorrys’_ or the _‘thank yous’._

Maybe some of those words were expected, but not the quiet, tear-filled _‘thank you’._

You never quite expect a thank you.

 

 

 

 

Harley Keener ( _“potato-gun kid?_ _Tennessee?”_ ) contacts you a month before you marry Pepper, tall as a tree and with hair to match.

You barely know it’s him, but five years isn’t enough time to forget the kid who, in some relative terms, saved your life.

He comes to New York, dragging an eight-year-old girl by the hand through the dirty streets and toward the penthouse that’s still home for some last-minute adjustments before the cottage is all there will be.

He comes to New York and asks the simple question; _‘what happened?’_

His mother’s gone, turned to dust right before his sister’s eyes and left Harley with what remained of his friend in his own two hands. They’ve got an uncle to meet in New York, but no one else has any answers.

You know the truth.

You give it to him, and you don’t.

 

 

 

 

Out of everyone you left behind at the Compound and then New York, Nebula is one of the only ones you’ve kept any kind of contact with.

You talked to Bruce for a while, but eventually it was easier to be left alone, but Rhodey and Happy never quite seemed to know when enough is enough. They were family, after all.

(The others were too, but sometimes you need space from every other kind of family there is to the word.

Rhodey and Happy and Pepper were there from the very start.)

She calls you sometimes when she’s out looking in deep space, because not even you can make a cellphone reach that far out without having received permission of contact from the other end.

You’ve never seen her smile, never heard her laugh. There was something at some point when you played that game on the ship, but not enough for you to be entirely sure. If there ever was a laugh on that ship from her, it sounded more like a growl.

You know her now, better than you did then, and you know that the smile is true when you show her Morgan for the very first time.

Her laugh sounds strained, rusted and so very, very pure.

 

 

 

 

_One thousand is simply not enough._

_Three thousand is where the very best are at_.

 

 

 

 

You grip Morgan tighter when you see the people in your driveway.

It’s been five years of ignored calls and no knocks on the door from both of your sides, most of all Steve’s, and it almost feels like he’s breaking the truce you’d made half a decade ago.

Natasha’s a mess, Steve looks far older than should be possible with the serum in his veins, and the human sized tic tac by his side looks sheepish and confused. You get why he’s confused, later when they tell you, but that doesn’t make time travel more scientifically possible than the living experiment standing on your porch.

It’s possible, you know this later and you know it now in a sense, but it is a godawful nightmare.

 

 

 

 

You’re sentimental. You’ve always been, and you guess you always will be, so you’re not entirely surprised when you remember that the shield is stuffed under Morgan’s unicorn and blanket in the back of your very expensive car.

You give it back, and it feels, a little bit, like nothing had really changed.

You’re sentimental, and Howard’s still your father.

It’s awkward and stiff, but it’s the most human you have, perhaps, ever felt with him since long before he died, and you had still to make every mistake in Howard Stark’s book.

 

 

 

 

Not all of you come back, and you all knew the risks, but never, _never,_ had you ever really imagined that anything but time to be your fatal enemy in this heist.

There’s nothing left of hers to bury, but you still have your memories. Still has that spitfire with red hair and bad jokes and an ability to scale a building faster than you could fly up it, trapped in your mind.

The girl who saw the worst of humanity and saw the best in you.

You still have that, and everything else.

 

 

 

 

Bruce snaps his fingers, and Barton’s phone rings.

Bruce snaps his fingers, scorches the skin from his arm and up his face, and Scott stares at the birds outside the window.

Bruce snaps his fingers, and all hell breaks loose.

 

 

 

 

You had always dreamed, when your dreams weren’t nightmares, that you would be the one to find the kid. Or that the kid would find you at whatever pearly gates there was after death and bring you to somewhere where everything was bright and beautiful.

You had never dreamt it being the kid that found you on a battlefield, not too unlike Titan so long ago, with a blacked-out sun, charred ground and his mouth already going a hundred miles an hour.

You’d never imagined the moment, only dreamt it, when you could finally wrap the kid in your arms and hold him there.

Hold him tight and hold him grounded before you allow him to shoot off to somewhere else and save the universe that had tried to save him.

You kiss his cheek, and hold him a second longer.

(God, how you almost wish you could have hold on just one moment longer.)

 

 

 

 

One liners are the best speeches. You’d said it once, after the whole _‘I-am-Iron-Man’_ debacle all those years ago, and now, it’s not too much different.

You stare Thanos in the eyes, smiles through power and pain and fear, and you snap your fingers.

You’d expected the pain to be… _felt_. Not sudden and then gone, gone so unlike the pain when you stole the stones from the titan’s golden gauntlet.

The pain is gone, and it’s all simple, blissful relief trapped in a cage of your body fighting death. That’s why it hurts. Because despite it all, you don’t really want to die.

You have fought death before. And this is what it should feel like.

Triumphant. Sad. Melancholy.

Peter lowers you, blood and dust in his face, and you wonder, for a bleak moment, if this was what it felt like for him when you held him one last time before the end. If this is what it would feel like in another universe, in another reality where you didn’t win, and Peter was the one that stayed.

 _‘We won’_ is such a simple phrase and you wish to wipe those tears from Peter’s face. You couldn’t then, when he vanished on a dead planet, and you can’t now, when it’s you who vanishes in other terms than ash.

 

(You told Fury, a lifetime ago, about what Wanda had made you see. How your legacy would be death of friend and the victory of foe.

But you broke the cycle of bad choices of Stark men who are made of iron.

You broke the cycle with Morgan. You broke the cycle with Peter. Those kids are what legacies are made of.

They are _your_ legacy.)

 

Someone pulls the kid away, and you wishes that he didn’t have to go, but then it’s Pepper who’s there and she has always been so beautiful. Even now, when there's soot and blood and that smell of barbeque in the air and it’s nothing like those evenings by the cottage.

She’s always so damn beautiful and she’s always made you smile.

You can face death, once again, with a smile.

 

 

Goodnight, Mister Stark.

You can rest now.

**Author's Note:**

> I HAD to include the kiss on the cheek even if it wasn't in the movie! It was too pure not to include!
> 
> Also, I am so emotionally drained after writing this thing, so I guess you can see why it took me so long to actually write something for Endgame.
> 
> Here's my [Tumblr](http://mathildahilda.tumblr.com) if you feel the need to scream with me about Endgame!


End file.
